This Emotional Life
by Richard Hutton, Paula S. Apsell, Peter Kunhardt, Dyllan McGee
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Hosted by Daniel GilbertDirector: Dyllan McGee, Paula S. Apsell, Peter Kunhardt, Richard Hutton
Brand: PBS
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Box set, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 360 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2010-03-02
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: PBS
Movie Reviews of This Emotional Life
Movie Review: Good summary of current thinking on these issues; a few flaws
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a well done documentary on the current thinking on emotional health. It covers the process of emotional development in connection with parents, as well as the many types of pathologies that can develop from poor childhood experiences (including with parents), possible genetic vulnerabilities, traumas such as war and issues with relationships with spouses and others.
I would recommend it to anyone, whether diagnosed with an emotional problem or not, as a great summary on these issues. If you have been diagnosed with an emotional problem, or if you have difficulty in relationships (who doesn't? :), you may find it especially helpful.
My only reservation about this DVD is that it represents current thinking on these issues (perhaps as it appears to a middle-aged male psychologist?) and does not quite get at some issues that were lurking in the background. As other reviewers have noted, the contexts of depth psychology (long-term psychotherapy getting at locating wounds, bringing their emotional content to the surface and resolving them), family systems issues, and broader "sickness" in the political-social-economic environment did not receive focus. These include:
1. Overfocus on mothering. There was some attention paid to fathers, such as the lawyer who had the son with attachment disorder. His statement that "My son's disease has meant I could not be the father I wanted to be. Instead this has been about meeting my son's needs. But maybe that is what a father is, really?" This was a great moment for showing how important healthier fathering is and how many men (and women) have a view that their authority is what is important rather than the child's needs. I was troubled that this was not called out by the narrator, however, while the single mother's need to learn how to make her child feel cared for and to support her child's autonomy was. Also, the financial markets guy who become a stay-at-home dad; I was disappointed that much was made of the fact he did not find fulfillment in being a stay-at-home dad; it seemed to me what was going on was that he was facing the very same issues that many stay-at-home moms do.
2. The sociological context in which many of these people were living. For example, the wife who had to get treatment to learn to enjoy sex with her husband shows a very common problem many women face in a culture that has traditionally focused on male sexuality and been male-dominant. Many families mirror this broader cultural context and the woman noted that she had to reverse the conditioning from her childhood, which was difficult. She seemed to be blaming her husband for this or wanting him to know how hard this was. I can understand this; since men are dominant in patriarchy it is easy to blame them for the problem; also because they are privileged it is often invisible to them how women suffer under it. Also, in what we often see as our most important relationship of adulthood, our marriage, we would want the other person to understand us and our situation better. I wish this context would have been noted, though.
This was also true with the husband who cheated on his wife. The wife's comments that she didn't "need" her husband led him to have an affair. I suspect her comments derived more from her wanting more of a sense of adult autonomy, which we all need, and which women are not often encouraged to develop, rather than not wanting to be with this man in particular as a partner. Also, his reaction when the psychologist said "not all men have affairs" was interesting as it seemed to show that he had just had an affair in part because he thought men were supposed to have affairs, not because he personally wanted to, which also shows how the sociological context of male dominance places distorting and dysfunctional pressures on men as well.
This broader context was also missing from the interview with David Buss; although there was a segue into how some couples manage to stay together despite the man-as-status-object/woman-as-fertility-object paradigm promoted by Buss as true "across cultures" there was not enough attention paid to how these problems can be prevented by reconciling patriarchy with feminism into raising children to be more well-rounded. Buss is a so-called "evolutionary psychologist" who, I think really just studies how the traditional male control of resources has affected people's psychology and created conflict between the sexes. Now that women are increasingly allowed direct access to resources, and male parenting skills are more at issue in women's mate selection (rather than just the man's ability to earn a living) and many men actually want to be good parents, I suspect we may see different psychology, with less conflict between the sexes, and healthier families, including better emotional health in children, emerge (if it hasn't emerged already). Buss is controversial because he doesn't take into account the socialized nature of patriarchy; the cultures he studies omit ones where men play more of a role in child-rearing and where women have leadership roles.
People interested in this broader context may find a book like "The Gender Knot" by Alan Johnson helpful.
3. The failure to note the family system of the depressed high school girl. I was troubled watching the mother take her to the appointments and, at the same time, ignore what her daughter said about blaming the mother and wanting her to fix it. As someone who has suffered from depression myself and done long-term therapy, I can say in my case that my depression was definitely rooted in oppressive circumstances in my home, which in turn derived at least in part from broader cultural oppression. I don't know if that is the case with this girl, but I thought the mother's dismissal of the daughter's comments could reflect a common set-up where the mother is in denial of her own past wounds, reproduces these in the child and even dumps the mother's discomfort onto the child, blaming the child in effect for raising issues the mother doesn't want to face about her treatment of her daughter and also about the mother's own buried wounds. This is very oppressive and a recipe for depression. Since in this family, the mother appears to have been the primary and possibly the only parent who is focused on the daughters (I don't think the father said anything at all?), this explains why the daughter would blame the mother and not the father. This single-parenting (which often happens even in married couples set up in the traditional male-provider, patriarchal style) is also a recipe for oppression as the mother often doesn't have autonomy and so subconsciously leans on the children. Also, the mother may block the child from having a good relationship with the father as all she has is "mothering." And the father may take no responsibility for learning parenting skills himself since he sees that as the mother's job. A book like Alice Miller's "The Drama of the Gifted Child" explains some of these issues.
Summary of This Emotional Life
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